I ran into a couple of small issues with Visual Studio 2013 today. First I moved my Projects folder into my OneDrive folder so that I could easily sync projects between machines. After that I uninstalled all of my instances of Visual Studio and then just installed Visual Studio 2013 Express.

When I tried to open a project from my OneDrive folder Visual Studio threw up an error saying Visual Studio only supports Windows Store Apps.

This was fixed by making the Projects folder available offline in OneDrive. I had tried to make it available earlier but it was still syncing and then I forgot to do it again …

After uninstalling and then reinstalling Visual Studio I found that there was not any emulator available and building a solution gave me the following errors:

There were deployment errors

HRESULT: 0x89721500

This was resolved by deleting all of the folders in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\ except for the highest numbered one which in my case was 12.0.

So I recently installed Visual Studio 2013 on my Surface Pro 3 and then found that I could no longer put it to sleep.

VS 2013 enables Hyper-v in Windows which developers use to test apps in other Operating Systems (such as Windows Phone). The problem is that Hyper-v conflicts with the advanced power management features (Connected Standby) on the Surface Pro 3.

Visual Studio 2013 running Windows Phone 8 emulator in Hyper-v

While Hyper-v can be turned on and off this requires a reboot – and the Surface Pro 3 can only be shutdown, restarted or hibernated while Hyper-v is running.

The work-around is to manually enable and disable hyper-v and then reboot.

To disable Hyper-v open an Administrator Command Prompt, enter this command and then reboot:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

Hyper-V can be enabled again with this command (which also requires a reboot):

The Type cover for the Surface Pro 3 is a little different than your regular laptop keyboard.

The function keys dim and brighten the back-light on the Type cover and open Windows functions such as Search, Sharing, Devices and Settings (amongst other things).

This can be pretty helpful – depending on what you are doing – but this default configuration means that one of my most used keyboard shortcuts Alt + F4 is not available.

The first solution is to just use Fn + Alt + F4 instead.

Otherwise pressing and holding the Fn key and then pressing Caps toggles the functionality of the top row of keys on the Type cover so that you can use Alt + F4. This is a toggle though – once you can use Alt + F4 you have to toggle back to use the default (pictured) functionality of these keys.